Siwan boy found dead in Calcutta

OUR BUREAU

Manish Ranjan

Siwan youth Manish Ranjan’s family members lodged a police complaint on Wednesday alleging that the final- year engineering student at Jadavpur University had been murdered.

Manish was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his hostel room on Tuesday afternoon. Friends said he was upset after failing to land a job at Amazon during campus placements and was disappointed with his performance in an online test by Microsoft.

He died before knowing that he had been found eligible to appear for subsequent rounds of the Microsoft recruitment process. Manish’s teachers and friends feel he has committed suicide. The student’s last rites were performed at the Nimtala crematorium on Wednesday evening.

In his police compliant lodged with Bidhannagar South police station, Manish’s father Kusheshwar Nath Mishra, a businessman from Siwan in Bihar, said his son might have been murdered in the university’s Salt Lake hostel.

“It (his death) was termed as suicide. But on August 6, … while it was being carried for post-mortem, we noticed many injuries on his body, including scratches on his left hand biceps. Now we realise he was beaten badly and then he was hanged with a cloth wrapped around his neck. So, it is our sincere request to the police that please cooperate with us to give justice in fair and clean manner,” the complaint read.

Mishra had initially refused to lodge the complaint but was persuaded into changing his mind by family members. Around 10.30am on Wednesday, before the body was taken to a hospital for post-mortem, Mishra was asked whether he would lodge a complaint saying his son had been killed.

A JU official said they were not surprised at the murder complaint. “How can the family accept that the elder son, a brilliant student and sportsman, had committed suicide? Let the police probe the case. We will cooperate with the family,” said a JU official.